Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Jun 10
2026

Mapping brain network changes linked to bipolar disorder severity and treatment

New research from the Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (Stevens INI) at the Keck School of Medicine of USC has discovered subtle but widespread differences in the brain’s communication networks in people with bipolar disorder, offering new insight into how illness severity and treatment may relate to brain wiring.

Published in Biological Psychiatry, the study was led by Leila Nabulsi, Ph.D., a senior research associate at the Stevens INI, together with Dara M. Cannon, Ph.D., professor at the University of Galway, Ireland. The team analyzed brain scans from 449 people with bipolar disorder and 510 healthy controls across 16 international research sites through the ENIGMA Bipolar Disorder Working Group.

This work was made possible by ENIGMA, an international consortium founded and led in part by Paul M. Thompson, Ph.D., associate director of the Stevens INI. ENIGMA brings together researchers worldwide to pool their brain imaging and clinical data, allowing them to detect subtle patterns that would be difficult to identify in smaller studies.

Jun 10
2026

Physicists harness potential of quantum phase transitions

Researchers at University College Dublin and international collaborators have just published a detailed and accessible guide that aims to translate theoretical ideas into practical devices for quantum enhanced sensing technologies.

Conventional sensors have enabled technologies from global positioning systems to satellite imaging. Quantum systems, however, provide the absolute best precision allowable by the laws of physics.

The challenge, however, is that quantum devices are often fragile. A promising theoretical avenue for designing quantum sensors not hindered by this fragility is called “critical quantum sensing.”

Jun 10
2026

Neutron-rich nuclei yield beta-decay clues that could refine heavy-element origin models

How are heavy elements formed in the universe? Extremely neutron-rich atomic nuclei and their beta-decay rates play an important role in this process. Until now, it has been very difficult to determine these rates experimentally. Researchers at TU Darmstadt have developed theoretical predictions for such processes and successfully compared them with experimental data, where they exist. The results were published in Physical Review Letters.

The study focuses on beta-decay rates of neutron-rich nuclei, which are of great importance for element synthesis in the universe. To better understand and predict these decay rates, the team developed modern “ab initio” methods in nuclear physics for these systems. These methods calculate the properties of atomic nuclei directly from the fundamental interactions between their constituents, without making empirical adjustments to known measured values.

The researchers combined modern nuclear forces and decay operators with many-particle methods to precisely determine the structure of nuclei and, from this, the decay rates. A key finding of the work is that the theoretical predictions agree very well with experimental data—in the range where such extremely neutron-rich nuclei can currently be studied at accelerator facilities. The latest experiments on these nuclei took place at the RIKEN research center in Japan.

Jun 10
2026

Yale Discovery Overturns Long-Held “Evolutionary Dead End” Theory

The discovery of Typhlichthys styx shows that cave-adapted species can continue evolving and splitting into new species, with underground aquifers playing a crucial role in that process.

Jun 10
2026

New FROST Attack Lets Websites Track What Sites and Apps You Open via SSD Timing

FROST uses JavaScript and OPFS SSD timing to identify websites at 88.95% F1, exposing cross-browser privacy leaks.

Jun 10
2026

Microsoft Defender RoguePlanet Zero-Day Grants SYSTEM Access on Updated Windows

A RoguePlanet PoC exploit targets a Microsoft Defender zero-day race condition and can produce a SYSTEM-level shell when successful.

Jun 10
2026

Six Proto6 Vulnerabilities in protobuf.js Expose Node.js Apps to RCE and DoS

Six Proto6 flaws in protobuf.js enable RCE and DoS attacks; patched in versions 7.5.6 and 8.0.2 to protect Node.js services.

Jun 10
2026

Microsoft Restores Some GitHub Repos, Keeps Others Offline as Miasma Probe Continues

Microsoft confirms it temporarily removed GitHub repos after Miasma worm compromised 73 of its open-source projects to inject an information stealer.

Jun 10
2026

WinRAR Flaw Exploited by Russia-Aligned Groups to Deploy Stealers in Ukraine

Two Russia-aligned cyber attack campaigns have continued to exploit a security flaw in WinRAR to target Ukrainian organisations, almost a year after patches for the vulnerability were released.

The activity has been attributed by Trend Micro to Earth Dahu (aka Gamaredon) and SHADOW-EARTH-066 (aka UAC-0226). It involves the exploitation of CVE-2025–8088, a path traversal flaw that allows an attacker to write files outside the extraction directory via NTFS Alternate Data Streams (ADS). It was patched by WinRAR in July 2025.

The findings show “how unmanaged software keeps an exploited entry point open long after the fix ships,” Trend Micro researchers Hiroyuki Kakara and Feike Hacquebord said in an analysis published Monday.

Jun 10
2026

Chrome V8 Zero-Day CVE-2026–11645 Exploited in the Wild — Patch Now

Google has released security updates to address 74 vulnerabilities, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

The high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026–11645 (CVSS score: 8.8), has been described as an out-of-bounds memory access in V8, Chrome’s JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.

“Out-of-bounds read and write in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 149.0.7827.103 allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code inside a sandbox via a crafted HTML page,” reads a description of the flaw in the NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD).